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It may not be dead, and it's entirely possible I'm shoveling dirt on something that's still writhing around, promising me it is in fact the next big thing, but I'm now deaf to its cries. Google Plus is a failure no matter what the numbers may say.

25 million users in barely a month is nothing to sneeze at. Google Plus holds the honor of being one of the fastest growing websites in history, and these early numbers had analysts screaming that Facebook would be all but dead in a few more months.

But today I click on my newsfeed and see tumbleweed blowing through the barren, blank page. It's a vast and empty wasteland, full of people who signed up but never actually stuck around to figure out how things worked in this new part of town. One simple click takes me back to Facebook, and my wall is flooded with updates and pictures from 400+ friends. This just isn't a contest, and it never will be.

To know why G+ has failed, we must first look at how Facebook succeeded.

Facebook had exclusivity on its side, a once-upon-a-time fact we're only reminded of when we watch The Social Network, but even when it expanded past college to the general population, it was a hundred times more user friendly and visually streamlined than MySpace. That site was destroyed by the tackiness of its own users with a propensity for glitter text GIFs and autoplaying pop songs, and when it failed to evolve, the exodus to Facebook was massive and unstoppable.

Conversely, we look at a recent failure, this time where Google came out on top. When's the last time you got THAT frustrated with the Google search engine? Sure, you might not find what you wanted on occasion, but 99.99% of the time, it fulfills its function exceedingly well. So why on earth would anyone feel the need to switch to Bing? It may work yes, but to the average user, it doesn't offer anything above and beyond what you'd find with Google, and in some avenues, is actually worse. But how many millions were invested in the idea? Did they really think they had come up with something to unseat the emperor of search?

Now Google has fallen into the same trap with Plus. If anyone is annoyed by Facebook, it's simply that they're tired of using it. Their gripes aren't from the layout, or even the privacy settings, as much as internet outrage over the suspect Terms of Service would have you believe. Google can launch a product that fixes Facebook's issues, and even looks a touch nicer to boot, but its biggest flaw is simply something it can't overcome. It's not Facebook.

My profile tells me everything I need to know about Google Plus, and I suspect the same is true for many others. As active as I am in social media and the latest and greatest internet trends, I have 26 people who have added me into circles, only 8 of them being people I wanted to add back, as for all Plus's claims of privacy and intimacy, I don't know most of the others. Out of those, only two post anything at all to the site, and the majority don't even have profile pictures yet, an indicator they haven't returned since day one. My recommended friends list is filled with people I'm actually close with, presumably pulled from my Gmail contacts, but the fact that we haven't added each other yet describes just how little we care about this new network.